


My arms, my eyes, my grieving  words

by lbmisscharlie



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Backstory, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Kidnapping, Rituals, Soulmates, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-08-09
Packaged: 2018-04-13 14:25:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4525410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn’t always sand and sun. It was Green. It was, it was. It was green in her heart and in her lungs and under her fingertips. It was green until she couldn’t feel or breathe or touch the green any longer because it was stolen with her heart’s love, and even then, it was green still, for moments longer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My arms, my eyes, my grieving  words

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks, as ever, to my dear friend and source of constant encouragement [peninsulam](http://archiveofourown.org/users/peninsulam/pseuds/peninsulam)

The sun is hot.

It is the most basic fact of life, now: the sun is hot, the sand is sharp, and they need to watch out for men with guns.

She feels it. She doesn’t want to feel it anymore, but then – 

There are worse things.

The first few weeks it bubbles her skin, brings up blisters in swaths across her back so when she sleeps, she does so face-down, like a corpse, and wakes with sand in her mouth. Her nut-brown skin goes crimson and white and peels in smallish, wet chunks, and what grows in after it is scarred and pitted, like a stone not yet worn smooth by the sand. 

It wasn’t always sand and sun, but – 

She shields her eyes and crouches, makes her voice wail and catch on the wind, a siren, an animal, an injured ghost. Two men on motorcycles crest the hill. Their lances bob and sway behind them, stiff and dangerous.

She wails; she cries; and the Mothers rain down on them. They take their motorcycles; they take their lances; they take their lives. And now the Vuvalini have a little more.

No longer a girl, she is still the youngest of them. Not a Mother, her initiation those many years ago left ruptured, incomplete, grown to thirty-four years with her skin winnowed to her bones and her hands made tight and strong and sure for bullets, not for seeds. So she is the one who climbs the tower, who sits in the cage and cries out sorrows not quite her own, for even at the edge of the living world men want to have and destroy what little beauty they find. 

It wasn’t always sand and sun. It was Green. It _was_ , it was. It was green in her heart and in her lungs and under her fingertips. It was green until she couldn’t feel or breathe or touch the green any longer because it was stolen with her heart’s love, and even then, it was green still, for moments longer. 

And _then_ it was black, and dead, and gone.

++

She hears something. Something – something climbs over the hill. A great beast: battle black and dusty chrome.

A War Rig.

It belches smoke, and the air around it shivers, and The Valkyrie cries her voice hoarse and then cries some more. Let it come to her, let it mark its tracks in her ever-shifting sand, let it be burned and buried. It comes closer. It roars, and she roars against it. 

It stops. She shields her eyes. Under her knees, the tower creaks, the only thing moving in the long, still air. 

The door opens. The door opens, and – her heart leaps – she doesn’t understand, doesn’t – she quiets, and a voice speaks.

“I’m one of the Vuvalini –” and is she she is – “From the Many Mothers –” and under her hands the wood is rough and she’s rising to her feet.

“I am the daughter of Mary Jo Bassa,” she says, a name forgotten, and the sand is hot and her skin is bare, and “My clan is Swaddle Dog,” and hers is White Birch, and they lived beside one another from the day of their births.

The sand is hot; her feet are bare. And her – and her – and her –

“My initiate mother was Katie Concannon,” and yes, yes that’s right, for they were initiates together: their first blood came together, and the next and the next, and they were never to be separated.

Katie Concannon died in the raid that took her heart’s love away; her heart’s love that is – that is –

“It’s me.”

And she is, she is, “She is our Furiosa,” she is Home. 

++

They were never to be separated. Not all initiates bond this way, this life’s-blood-bond, but it is not unheard of. She feels her heart beating in her own, knows the movement of her hips-thighs-knees as she walks, can take her hand and twist their fingers together like holding something safe.

She knows her Name.

All Vuvalini have two: a name to be called – a child’s name – and a name to _be_. Only the first is known before initiation; the second is given up to the world at the ritual at the end of initiation so a woman can Become. She shouldn’t know her name, and yet –

“Furiosa,” she whispers, and her now-Furiosa blinks her eyes awake. “That’s you,” she says, to the steady pulse-blood in the curve of her neck. “Our Furiosa.”

“Anahara,” Furiosa says, awake now. “How do you know?” Anahara smiles, for Furiosa’s not the only one who can walk on unheard feet and listen where she shouldn’t. She kisses her, on her mouth that tastes like green and water. “And you?”

“The Valkyrie,” she says, and it settles at home in her ribs, just under where Furiosa’s hand lies, pressing her to the earth. 

The Green is a soft, cool cradle below them, and above them the stars spread out to the edges of the world.

++

Above them, the stars. 

The girls are older than they should be. They’re the age of rolling in green grass, of cool water lapping at the edges of their soft and new bodies, of laughter and wonder and joy.

Instead they bear children, bear weapons, bear hard, flinty glares that don’t quite trust anyone but each other. They cling together with love, yes, but with fear and anger too. Curled together, they sleep fitfully, unused to the sand under them and their own bruised bodies.

The stars chase away the heat of the day, and The Valkyrie wraps Furiosa’s shoulders in a blanket. She won’t sleep; instead she stares across the salt and breathes deep and strong. The Valkyrie sits beside her, close enough that she can feel the warmth of Furiosa’s body across the narrow strip of air between them, and talks. 

“It had already started when you were stolen,” she says, remembering how she found the first dead, slimy Green in the days after, knowing the earth mourned with her. “First the Green went sour and dead, then the water, then the soil itself. We stayed, but more and more died of the thirst and the hunger.”

Furiosa says nothing, but curls her shoulders tighter. Her fingertips worry the edges of the blanket, then stop. “I know this,” she says, and The Valkyrie exhales. 

“It’s all I have left,” she says: a frayed-edged fragment of the blanket she was given at the start of their initiation. Its colors are the dried, faded colorlessness of sand, now, and the embroidered vines end in trailing tendrils of tattered thread, but it covered them many nights, their still-young bodies curled together. 

She lost her life when Furiosa was stolen; not died, but lost; and now she feels it glimmering deep in her chest, in the place so deep the sand and the sun can’t reach it. She looks out across the salt. One hundred and sixty days, they’ve figured, if no one falls ill and the baby in the womb of The Dag does not prove too greedy. She doesn’t say what she fears: the salt is bigger than one hundred sixty days; the salt is all of the seven thousand days Furiosa has been stolen; the salt will take their lives finally and forever. She doesn’t say it, because Furiosa nurses the smallest flame of hope in her chest, and she won’t be the one to snuff it out.

++

The man stops them. The Valkyrie’s hands ache for a fight; when Furiosa’s eyes slide to hers, she nods.

They’ll make a new Green Place.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is taken from Margaret Atwood's [The Deaths of the Other Children](https://www.poeticous.com/margaret-atwood/the-deaths-of-the-other-children?locale=en), because there could not be another painfully perfect poem for the Vuvalini.


End file.
